I was giving up. I would have given up – ... if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said, "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen."
(2.53.5, Life of Pi, Yann Martel)

I had to stop hoping so much that a ship ... would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway's worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little. Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
(2.58.9, Life of Pi, Yann Martel)

"That people get too reckless
That even with the simplest of crimes
They leave, blood behind"

Evening Love Song

Ornamental clouds
compose an evening love song;
a road leaves evasively.
The new moon begins
a new chapter of our nights,
of those frail nights
we stretch out and which mingle
with these black horizontals.

Rainer Maria Rilke

"The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift." — C.S. Lewis

"So the poor have hope & injustice shuts its mouth" Job 5 v16

Through our constant striving for convenience, we are eradicating the raucous and edifying beauty of our true environment and replacing that beauty with a safe but completely faux environment. We have a society steadily undoing itself, it might be argued, by its win over resourcefulness. Clever, ambitious and always in search of greater efficiency, we have, created a world of push - button, round - the - clock comfort for ourselves.

The basic needs of humanity - food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, transportation, and even sexual pleasure - no longer need to be personally laboured for or ritualized or even understood. All these things are available to us now for mere cash. Or credit.

'Show up for your own life...don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle - feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber thorugh life in an instant - gratification sugar coma...be awake' (Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert).